The Cold Effects of Southern Ground
by Antje
Summary: A young Zero character study. The plague is on. Zero hunts for a mystic who might be able to help. Winter spreads into the south. The Queen's power is waning. Little Princess DG is dead. The country is falling into civil war.
1. Chapter 1

**The Cold Effects of Southern Ground**

Summary: A look at Zero's life before the Sorceress.  
>Written: 14-20 March 2008<br>Length: About 20,000 words; 8 chapters

-x-

There is a subtle essence that pervades all reality.  
>It is the reality of all that is, and the foundation of all that is.<br>That essence is all.  
>That essence is the real.<br>And thou, thou art that.  
>– Ken Wilber, <em>A Brief History of Everything<em>

-x-

The lay of the land was a familiar plain. Tall grasses whispered in the southern wind. The tops were burning red as gloaming neared. An aerial soared above, ever and on, to the north, the city that he would one day inhabit. Every full breath was dusty and dry: hardening, cheapening life That Side of the Rip. Barely alleviated by the humidity of the wide, wild river from which so many eked a livelihood. Beneath the loving, rippling arms of a caddie oak, a boy of fifteen wove vagaries and druthers. The grasses swallowed him. He knew peace.

He swatted at his face. A tickling. An insect? No, a giggle. A scent. A change in the wind. And a shadow switched the light of the sinking suns.

He flicked open his eyes. More than a giggle. A sister. A little brother. Family. Golden-haired and wide-eyed.

Thin books were brought together into a neat stack. Non-fiction of religious sorts; fiction of heroic fables. He held them close and tromped through the meadow. The splash of the river guided them home.

'It took us forever to find you,' the girl said. 'You do know how to hide when someone's looking for you.'

The boy looked at his brother with adoration extending. 'How do you do that, Zero?'

'I don't know,' Zero replied. 'Guess I do it without meaning to.'

-x-

Father always smelled of fish. Most of the men in the southern village carried this trait, carried it with pride. River trout and wet earth and bait. The innate aroma tried the arrogance of their old man, but brought comfort to his children. And Mam, made of bread and honey and coals, she smelled of home, yarn, soap. The ingredients of love and care.

'Zero! How do you get such a mess?' Mam tossed him a damp cloth from the sink. 'Wipe off before you sit at the table, huh?'

'He's fifteen!' Argued Dad, already gripped by potatoes and greens. 'That's what boys of fifteen do, Zasha! They get dirty! Where'd you find him, Nittie?'

'Oh, so you think Nitten found him! She didn't!' cried the little one, ripping the damp cloth from Zero. 'Why's she get the credit?'

'Because you can't find your marbles half the time, that's why!' Zero roughly, brotherly tangled the cloth against the shapeless face. 'That's what they say about you, you know! Vier Dertien, the kid with no brains!'

'Zero!' Mam scowled. She pushed him, with unwonted force, into a simple table chair.

Zero thought a brighter reprimand was on its way. But he caught Dad winking at him. Nitten was the gentle soul. Vier had all the energy. What talent did Zero have? A sharp wit. Intelligence to an impenetrable core. A man with that sort of character, his dad told him, got out of southern river towns like Liddell—out for good.

They were all seated. Quiet fell. Nitten's homemade wind chimes tinkled and crackled from the clematis post in the garden. They prayed the gods to keep food on the table. Zero prayed the gods did a lot more than just that.

-x-

At the start of spring, at the last frost, Zero preferred to spend nights in the barn. Cooler, breezier, and away from the cramped house for a while. Cosy in winter of dreary rain, but unnecessarily cosy in the arid summer. He slept in the stall of hay and grains. Their horse and donkey often watched from over the wall. Down upon him with caring, curious eyes.

He woke to find a slant of moon beaming bright against the hay, catching the straightness of his fingers before his face. He'd heard a slam… From far off, in a dream… And then the slam became stomps of feet across the garden path.

Nitten, brandishing a lantern. The light caught the stain of fresh tears.

Zero's insides turned black.

-x-

He loitered at the foot of his parents' bed. A candle was lit. The lantern still an object in Nitten's trembling hand. Vier sobbed. Little hands wrapped at his waist, and soft curls were hot beneath Zero's palm.

'Zero, make them better.'

'Vier, I need to think. Just give me a second. Nittie?'

'Come on, Vier.' She took him by the hand and into the kitchen. A mumble about water, a placation, a hold at his shoulder. A lie that it would be all right.

Zero scanned his parents. They were sick. How had it come on so fast? Rumours and fears had been passed through the realms, whispers of a plague… But that was in land beyond the Gorge. That was not the south.

'Mam, can you hear me?'

'Zero,' she responded weakly. 'You must get away.'

'I'm not going to get sick. You ever remember a time I've been sick?' He sounded it off, banging like a shotgun in the deadening pall of the room. 'Oh, don't worry, Mam, I'll take Nitten and Vier and go—before they get sick.'

'Son,' his father struggled to lift his head, and Zero couldn't watch the pale face in the warm light, 'get to your uncle's. Find—find finch.'

'Finch?' Zero repeated it. 'What's finch? A person, a place? Dad, what is it?'

But they were both too exhausted. Too gone.

He strode to his siblings. 'We need to go. Now.'

'I don't want to!'

'Vier, hush,' Nitten told him. She was the eldest, though Zero… Zero was the wisest—if the cruellest. He was coarse, and no flaccid whim existed in negative land.

-x-

They packed what they could carry. Zero took nothing of his own, only two tools, food, the last spare cloak, the last holed blanket. Before leaving, he brought in water, laid it next to the bed, kissed the hot foreheads of his parents. Two sticks in an 'X' were formed on the door. A sign of the hex. He took Vier's hand, cool, small, childish yet, and led them through the garden. Nitten took the donkey and the horse by the reins.

'Don't look back, Nittie,' Zero reminded her. 'It's bad luck.'

'Bad luck,' she didn't look back, 'is better than no luck at all.'

He scrunched his eyes together. Leaving, leaving—they were leaving.

He could look back. What was bad luck now? But there was hope, and it kept him facing forward. He prayed the gods to keep them safe. And he wasn't sure of the 'them'. Those left behind, or those going into the fresh greenish light of pre-dawn?

Vier was mumbling to himself. Zero heard the words. He didn't know how many more miles prayer would be with him. No longer was it a strand of unaware repetition. It was effort. It was a will he was forgetting to obey.

When they passed the river, the road to town wound on.

Zero angled his head over his shoulder. The meadow and the caddie tree. A place he couldn't forget. A name crumbled from the tip of his tongue.

'Finch.'

A name he wouldn't allow himself to forget.

-x-

No light burned at a solid farmhouse on the outskirts of Liddell. 'It's too early,' Nitten whispered. 'No one will be up yet. Hurry, Zero, help!' He did what he could. He unlocked the paddock. A horse snorted awake and murmured low and softly. Nitten led in their horse, their donkey. Once the harnesses were off, they were set free. Yet they remained, maudlin creatures, sympathetic of spirit, and did not wish to be a remnant of the past.

'We'll come back for you,' Nitten assured them. 'As soon as we know we can. But they'll take care of you. You know we can't take care of you.'

'Nittie, let's go!'

She lingered, a heart hurting. Zero turned his head to the sky. In the west, clouds gathered, bubbles of them contrasted by starlight and freezing fingers of the near moon. 'It's going to rain later. Fantastic. Nittie, come on! They'll be fine.'

She rushed from the paddock. Zero secured the gate. And still the horse and donkey watched them as into the night their family ran.

-x-

As Zero had predicted, it rained. For a while, thunder clashed and lightning veined. Nitten kept them going, even after Zero wished to stop. Vier was small, and half-feared a drowning before they reached their uncle's. She urged them. She knew the road better. Older, having travelled it more, she knew the twist of it, a homestead surrounded by a low picket fence, a village slumbering.

When the rain transformed in a heavy mist, they passed between boarded up stores, broken windows, and it was too late to go round.

Nitten angled, light on her feet, poised for flight. 'Zero, what is this dreadful place?'

'I think it's… No, it isn't. It isn't anything now. Look.' He indicated a home with a white-washed oval and line stark on a faded grey door. 'We're near the Rip now. The farther north we go, the more we're going to see that.'

Vier gaped, trembling in and out. 'What is it?'

Zero angled his brother's head away. Impossible to shield a boy of nine annuals from the truths of the world, though the input could be limited. Vier had had nightmares all his young life. Zero didn't wish to add to the measureless collection.

'A sign of the plague.'

Vier understood this well enough. Allusions to the plague were recalled. He shuddered and tried not to imagine the suffering of his parents.

'Death made this place a ghost town,' Vier said.

Zero shot Nitten a look. Vier was of too few annuals… Zero's agony was silent. He gripped tightly to Vier's hand.

He was too young… Too young. Not just yet.

-x-

Zero had a way with fire. They say that magic used to exist in the O.Z. In some people it still clung on, in little ways, and refused to leave. Nitten believed this of Zero. He had a way of turning a damp twig, a match, a leaf, into a fire to keep off the damp chill.

He sat near the flames, arms wrapped tightly at his knees, head tilted, eyes shut. Vier was huddled nearby, a mound of blankets. Zero had spared his.

'Looks like spring forgot to come tonight,' Nitten said quietly.

Zero didn't respond. He was troubled, thoughtful, and Nitten had seen such an expression only on the faces of old porch-dwellers of Liddell.

'What do you think it means?' she continued. 'The finch thing, I mean. Think it's someone Uncle knows?'

'I've no idea.' He roused to throw another stick on the fire. Sparks reached enviously for their brothers and sisters in the sky. 'Get some sleep, Nittie.'

-x-

'Hello,' a friendly, round face looked down at a trio of youngsters, 'you lot looking to cross into the north, are you?' He figured it would be the oldest one, a lass of seventeen annuals, who'd answered. But it was the boy, about the age of his own boy back home, who gave careful response.

'We're heading to our uncle's home in the shire of Enscommon. He lives in the village of Gatehill-on-Cleg.'

'You don't say!' The guard snorted. 'You don't have to tell me his name or what he does, lad. Still allowed to come and go as you please round the realms.'

'Sorry,' Zero mumbled, 'it's just that—you hear things.'

'That you do, lad. One does be hearing things. You say this uncle of yours lives in Gatehill, that right?' He watched the lad nod. 'Right, well, I'm betting you're looking for Captain Dertien.'

Zero's distrusting gaze narrowed poignantly. 'How'd you know?'

'He's my superior, so it happens. You're his relations. Said you might be coming through.'

Nitten's fists clenched. Vier started to question how uncle might've known they were on their way. He quieted when Zero pinched his shoulder.

'Better get a move on, haven't you?' The guard spun his hand in circles, stepping aside to allow them access to the pedestrian bridge. 'Send your uncle regards from the bridge patrol, if you'd be that kind.'

All manners of realm denizens wandered across the bridge that sunny, cool afternoon. Two teenagers and one small boy were hardly noticed. Zero was pleased with the anonymity.

Only when they reached the north shore of the gorge did Nitten, fit to burst, manage to verbalize the ubiquitous query.

'How, by the names of all the sacred gods, does Uncle know we're coming?'

Too forlorn, too eager to usher in hope and welcome it where it didn't belong, Zero formed a weak reply. 'Perhaps Mam and Dad are better—and sent word to Uncle that we are on our way.'

Remembrances of the ghost town, destroyed by sickness, wended and parked in Zero's imagination. A memento of cold swept up and down his spine.

Imagination, he decided, destroyed truth and mangled hope.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

They called Enscommon a rocky shire. Its southern and east borders were crooked, formed from two meandering rivers. And from these shot out a vast arrangement of sinuous, achromatic streams. Few trees grew, and those that did were pines with ponderous, venose boughs. Mist and fog were atmospheric staples. Nitten pulled Vier's hood above his mop of sandy locks, to protect him. But if he were going to catch the illness, surely he would've shown signs by then…

'This is where I stop knowing the way so well,' Nitten explained her lacking awareness. 'It always looks different, whenever I'm here. And that's funny: A place like this doesn't have seasons. Its only ever a season of rain, rain and that numbing chill.'

'It's quiet, isn't it?' Vier gaped at the tall trees on either side of the sorry road. Once, this road had been paved with red clay bricks, but it had fallen into disrepair in the annuals beyond the reign of the House of Pastoria. Vier's toe kicked a crumbled piece. The ping and clunk made a welcome noise.

Soon, they passed beyond the trees and into the hilly, feral region of the Enscommon Moors. The brick road continued to hug the side of the cliff, and below them ran one of the river's estuaries. The basin was flat, surrounded by high, golden grass and, here and there, a splash of purple that was wild heather. Hawks hovered aloft, hardly visible against the pearls of a sagging, leaded sky. The estuary calmly danced away, but not before they saw, in the sprawling dish below, several pale squares, unnatural against the land.

'What are those?' Vier squinted to better see against the afternoon glare. No sun in Enscommon, not often, but the glare against a bleak place, made of grey rocks and colourless tumbles of meadows and streams, was hard on the eyes after hours and hours.

'It's an encampment,' began Nitten. She wrapped her shawl tighter and started away. 'That's all.'

Zero fixed the encampment in his mind's eye, and thereafter pondered it as a spectral presence. First the plague, and then the unrest. And rumours, rampant, venomous rumours, about the Queen. He urged Vier on, a boy smitten with the thought of guns and armies and grand, bloody battles. War isn't elegant, Zero tried to tell his little brother, as his father had tried to tell him—and grandfather—and, perhaps, Uncle. The only member of the clan who'd ever been in the army. And had been for annuals. Since, Zero glanced at his sister, the age of seventeen.

Vier glanced at the encampment once more. 'Zero, what if Uncle's there? What if we get to Gatehill and he's gone? What will we do?'

'Then we'll find him. If we have to.' He grabbed a spherical pome in his satchel, shined it, and gave it to Vier. 'But we'll worry about that later, all right?'

Vier bit into the apple. For a moment, the fear of reaching Gatehill was defeated. Doubt made their strides longer. Anxiety tried to speed up time, but time was capricious: she slowed them down over the extensive climb of moor hills.

-x-

The moors relinquished themselves at the duke's estate. The house was visible from the road, and long did they ogle over it. Nitten had seen it once, annuals before, when she'd travelled to the north to spend the summer with Uncle. It remained unchanged from the picture sculpted in memory. And yet it was bleaker, darker, the carious shadows awaiting.

'They say the duke's gone to Central City,' Zero informed them. He'd spent many hours loitering around Liddell, listening to the talk of the porch-dwellers, listening to the ramblings of bored old laundry matrons. 'He fears for the welfare of himself and his family. He has two daughters.'

'I think they were sent to Chaplet,' added Nitten. 'The Academy of Realm Sciences is one of the safest places. Always has been. Never mind that the duchesses have no interest in becoming members of the Stellate or ceremony leaders. Look at this.'

She stopped before a post, tall, narrow, with decaying boards stuck to it. Weather, wind and suns had done their deed, and the writing was barely visible. Zero tried to make it legible.

'It's a marker. A directional marker. I think it's telling us that Gatehill is that way.' He pointed to the east. And, he'd no sooner said it than the sign pivoted, post and all, and then told them Gatehill was to the west. He huffed. Vier giggled. Nitten found it worth a smile herself.

'Never mind, we don't need it.' She waved at the post. 'Thanks, anyway.'

The next markers they came to were of brick and stone. 'These mark the edges of the duke's land,' Zero said.

His head shot up at the uncanny, startling rattle of a carriage and horse team. A whip lashed and cracked. Zero pulled Vier to the verge, Nitten to the opposite side, just as the Brougham thundered dangerously close. Zero had a short chance to check the coat of arms upon the carriage door.

'Was that the duke?' Nitten gazed after the fanciful Brougham, ideas of court members playing havoc with her sensibility.

'It was of his house, I think,' Zero responded, less enthused about royalty flying about. The upper classes concerned him so little—as little as the lower classes concerned the upper. All the same, royalty was to be revered, respected, if only for one reason. 'But I think it was the Marquess. He protects the duke's land.'

'Protects it from what?'

'Everyone else.'

-x-

Gatehill-on-Cleg was a thriving community that had triumphed over the plague some months previous. The cemetery outside of town had doubled its size, and no undertaker, no groundskeeper, was able to keep up with the responsibility. It was a mess of mass burials. And a long, descending hill to a woods was a cascade of rows and rows of stakes. Zero gripped Vier's hand automatically, an inherent desire to be comforted by the living while passing the dead.

The streets of the village were narrow, circular, hardly following the straight avenues of the newer regions in the north-west. Gatehill was one of the O.Z.'s oldest inhabitations. Shops were street-level, with residences of storekeepers above. All were huddled side-by-side. Pitched roofs were steep, chimneys frequently covered in elegant little caps, and all facades were ivory or white or pale yellow, half-timbered, with little windows sparkling clean from all the rain. Here, villagers smiled and had kind manners. In spite of the common gloom, they were happy, but Zero sensed the same instability felt in Liddell. Something eagerly awaited its chance. A serpent, a dragon, a beast that would come and make true all their fears. The world knew its destiny, and all it could do was accept it, the way burghers of Gatehill accepted the weather, accepted the plague, and continued a proud march of normalcy.

'Excuse me.' Zero stopped and gave this greeting a kind intonation. The woman he judged to be of the same working class as his family, and this was done intentionally. He rarely spoke to upper classes. He wanted no condescension. 'Could you tell us if Captain Dertien remains in town?'

She balanced a market basket on one hip, skeins of freshly-dyed wool bundles in the other. 'Captain Dertien? He is, lad, he is. Not been shipped out like the others just yet. Heard a telling that he might be soon. You his kin? Look like him. Got the same eyes as ye, lad. Yeah, he be at home still. Tell him Sally wishes him a pleasant day, if you'd be that kind.' She sauntered off, across the street. A stray dog waddled behind at her boot heels, a yellow feather stuck to one muddy paw.

'I hope Uncle has something good to eat,' Vier said. 'I feel like we haven't eaten for days. Do you think it might be true that Mam and Dad are better, and we'll be sent home?'

To this, Zero had no answer. Hope was incogitable. Dreams were vague. And truth was a mere phantom.

-x-

Uncle owned a cottage, the place, Zero had once heard tell, that belonged to uncle's wife, dead since before Zero was born. Built of greyed blue clapboards, a roof of wooden shingles done in a faded rust hue, a cosy nook for a front door between flowering dwarf trees, Zero tried to fix it with the place he had seen when he'd been just younger than Vier's annuals. He had been smaller then, and the house bigger. And now it was reversed: The house was small, and he was bigger.

Signs of life filled them with optimism. The golden front door rested ajar. A white cat searched in vain for a sunny spot on the step. White linens ruffled like square apparitions along a laundry line in the back garden. The cottage was preened, clean, inhabited.

The three siblings exchanged smiles and gladness, and, fuelled by relief, dashed towards the open door. Grass whipped against their ankles. Vier was the fastest, despite his smallness, and pushed in the golden portal. The cat accompanied them inside, a leisure stroll, a fluffy tail, a bend around a corner.

'Uncle?' Zero shouted. The foyer wound upward, open, to a balcony of the second storey, a candle chandelier of brass unlit in an alcove of dark gradients. 'Uncle? Are you here? It's Zero.'

As he spoke, the three of them separated, curiosity and nervousness moving them to find Uncle quicker.

A thud from somewhere. The back of the house. Zero's feet careered him around corners unfamiliar, through a sitting room, a dinning room, a kitchen, and—

'Uncle!'

Nitten came behind him. Vier, the last to arrive, gave momentary pause before throwing himself around Uncle's lean girth.

'I thought you would get here soon,' he said, heartily sighing. Lowered to Vier's height, he kissed the boy on each cheek, his pleasant hazel eyes filled with cheer. A good-natured man, affable, jolly, and hardly ever out of uniform. Vier had a difficult time looking away from the shine of buttons and medals and ribbons and such adornments on a wool coat of dark apricot.

'You're all looking well, and aren't Uncle Pip's eyes glad to see you! Zero, my gods, boy, you're getting tall! And Nitten, lovely as ever.' He held them close, the three of them at once, and bound them together beneath the stress of uncertainty, the unravelling of the comfort they had always known. 'I'm so glad you arrived here safely. Though I had it on good authority you would. Come in to the kitchen, and I'll fix you up with some stew.'

A big pot was pulled from the ice box, and set to rest on the iron stove. Uncle Pip set Zero on the task of stoking the fire. No one knew fire better than Zero, and this belief had been a part of the Dertien clan since the boy was a toddler. As predicted, Zero had the stove heated in a wink. Uncle Pip went to the back door, off the little mudroom and supply pantry, and gave a hearty shout to the garden.

'Caroline! Caroline!'

At the call, in came a cat, cream and orange and white, a patch of black on her left ear. And then the other cat, from the porch at their arrival, swooped in. Vier, delighted by animals, and Nitten, delighted to see Uncle Pip in high spirits, caring for creatures the way he cared for them, watched as the two felines were fed, scratched, softly spoken to. And then he grabbed a half-loaf of bread. It was set at the table along with him.

'Stew will be up in a minute. Was your journey arduous? Did you come the Brick Route?'

'The red one,' responded Nitten, muffled by a chunk of crust in her mouth.

'Uncle Pip!' cried Vier, suddenly remembering what he'd witnessed. 'Uncle, we saw an encampment of soldiers! Little tents out in a field! We thought you might be there.'

'No,' laughed Uncle, 'not for a few weeks yet. But I know what company you speak of. They are on their way to the north. The far north. A legion sent to protect the Northern Island. But never mind that, never mind that.'

While Zero was interested in hearing about the nearing influences of a thorough occupation of military throughout the realms, more pressing questions burned. 'How'd you know we were coming? We thought maybe Mam and Dad sent you a telegram.'

'Ah,' drawled Uncle Pip. 'No, afraid they didn't. All the same, I know how sick they are.'

'How? And how'd you know? We found out from the guard at the Rip. He said he was expecting us.'

Uncle Pip curled and twirled the end of his greying moustache. His topaz gaze flickered about, as a gem in the suns. 'Well, that takes some explaining, you see. You see, er, there's a mystic about in Gatehill.'

Nitten gaped. 'A mystic!'

'Indeed, indeed. He came by and told me that your mother and father were ill, and that I was to prepare my home for visitors. He called you—what was it he called you? Passengers? Members? Flowers? Well,' he waved an impatient hand, frustrated at his lacking memory, 'it was something unusual. He was here three days before.'

Zero sank into the chair. 'Three days ago is when Mam and Dad got sick. Could be a coincidence. I have never seen a mystic.'

'There's old Mrs. Hagglethorne,' Nitten began speculatively, 'who lives near the Liddell marshes. But she's not really a mystic. An old crone with some folk magic, knowledge of herbs. She is a bit batty.'

'All mystics are a few bats short of a full belfry, my dear Nitten.' Uncle Pip assured her that the mystic in question was, also, a bit batty. 'He's a peculiar sort, and if you have never met a mystic before, he will not be easily forgot. Afraid he's become a bit of an anchorite in Gatehill. Lives in the back of a tea shop. Rarely has company. And is often seen wandering about, rain or shine. And everyone always knows where he's been.'

'How so?' asked Zero.

'Well, it's the most curious thing—but he leaves behind a trail of feathers. Bright yellow feathers, more often than not. That's how he got his name, I suppose.'

'His name?'

'They call him the Yellow Finch.' 


	3. Chapter 3

3.

Night spread its wings quickly in the north. Spring may never show save for the budding of paludial wildflowers, and a slight incline of temperature; but there in the rocky shire the suns set in a flash. Zero watched them go, an anxious twist in his stomach, as he traversed the last knob back to Gatehill.

He was on his way to find the Yellow Finch, the mystic, as he believed his father had asked of him. 'Find the finch.' After repetition of this request to Uncle Pip, Zero proclaimed his intention. 'What will you tell him, even if he does let you talk to him?' Nitten, keenly aware of her brother's stubbornness, merely wished Zero would progress through this at a meticulous pace. Mystics, to her, were not to be trifled with, and were not to be ordered about. Zero's mumbled reply was his common 'I don't really know, Nittie.' A pause, then: 'But I'll worry about that, as you say, if he lets me talk to him at all. No, Uncle, you don't have to come: I'd much rather go alone.'

Alone he was. The sky cleared but for tangled lumps of brightening clouds, in all the blends of colours that made swift work of emotions, of homesickness. Since a boy, he'd wanted to leave Liddell, a dead-end place, full of vacant, expressionless dwellers, backs bent with annuals of ghastly burden. And there he was, a road on the other side of the Rip, an image of suns-set burning before him, and tears of worry and aggravation flowing as the sea.

The sight of Gatehill, alit by windows and a few intermittent streetlamps, sanitated and cleansed all in one moment.

The mystic lived in the back of the tea shop, and Uncle Pip's directions, spot on though they were, led Zero to frilled lace curtains behind leaded casement windows: a tea room that was clearly closed for the night. Zero was about to take to a narrow alley beside the tea shop, to try his luck aft, when a rambunctious piano tune filled the street.

Having heard so little piano music, and not expecting to find it in Gatehill, Zero allowed himself a moment to peek into the restaurant across the street. It may have once been a saloon, annuals ago, when Gatehill was a pioneer town run by shepherds and ranchers. Now it had a touch of class, gilt and velvet, round tables lit by candlelight, an elegant bar where the most elegant citizens of town were turned to the proceedings on a little outcropping to the right. A stage, some three feet lifted from the ground, whereupon rested the timeworn upright instrument. Its keys were blasted by the large, long-fingered hands of a most unusual character. In the drone of fast-paced ragtime, that sent toes tapping and faces smiling, Zero was able to sneak into the restaurant, despite his lower-class garb, the holes in his coat, and lean into the shadows. Nitten and Vier always said he had a way of disappearing when he didn't want to be found…

At the piano was a lad who couldn't surpass Zero in too many annuals. He had to be close to Nitten's age, a certain square set in his jaw expressing this. His features were plain: plain syrupy brown eyes, drab mouse-brown hair cut short at the neck and left long at the top; and one wasn't likely to think twice about him if he were not dressed so strange. His boots were tall, rider's boots, and laced all the way to his knees, to soft leggings hidden beneath the kilt of northern clans. The light was too dark to distinguish the colours of the kilt, or any pattern, but Zero realised he wouldn't have known one clan from another. Above the kilt was a gentleman's raiment: a fine silk waistcoat, nickel buttons, a clean, crisp white shirt whose sleeves were rolled and pushed to the elbows. The player's wrists were knobbly, thin, yet easily controlled, just as his fingers slid up and down the range of keys unctuously.

'I am not in the habit of singing,' the piano player told the crowd, 'or crooning, or playing the piano. But I thought I might entertain you tonight with a fine song. Because I was bored. And to thank all of you for showing me hospitality ever since I arrived. And that, I have to say, was something I did out of the blue. I've never been to Gatehill in my life. Rather glad I did!'

He spoke youthfully, cheerfully. Behind that rested conceit, contention, aggression. He dared people to contradict him. But, of course, such a thought failed to come to them.

The song began, and a show started. Whoever he was, he was a talented performer. His energy was never spent except to enliven the crowd. They whooped and hollered and lost all sense of decorum as he sang. Zero was allured, as they were, but he remained reflective, speculative. He couldn't easily forget that he'd come into town that night to find the Yellow Finch. Grateful when the song ended, to an uproar of applause, Zero remained sitting while the assembly stood. The player went to the edge of the stage to receive this praise gratefully.

And that's when Zero saw it.

One lone, lissom yellow feather. It drifted from the player to faint upon the stage.

-x-

The Finch.

He removed himself from the throng, from the stage, to a small table for two in the back corner of the restaurant. As Zero approached, he noted that the Finch must've been seated there before succumbing to the whim of performance, for at rest atop the surface was a glass mug with two sips left of grog, a deck of cards, a sheet of paper, a pen, and a greatcoat hanging on the opposite chair.

Just as Zero reached this intimate little arrangement, a server swept by and left two mugs of the same amber grog. The mystic murmured a thanks but didn't look up. Not even when Zero stalled at his side.

Zero looked at his feet. Two feathers already.

'Is there any use in asking you to sit?' the mystic asked. He was scribbling with the fountain pen, shorthand, Zero thought it must be. A weird series of squiggles that couldn't possibly be a real language. 'I've already bought you a drink.'

Then Zero was regarded. A look so potent that Zero's shoulders twitched, but he held fast to the gaze, regarding in return. The eyes he supposed plain were not so plain at all. They were flecked with green and gold. Almost wise. Almost kind. A reminder of a meadow in autumn, a bouquet of wild grasses about to wither in frost. They crinkled beneath downy, mud-hued lashes as he smiled.

'You do drink, don't you? Of course you do. Sit, sit! Move the coat if you have to. I do have a habit of just leaving it about willy-nilly. Give it here and I'll put it behind me.'

Zero did this, then wondered why he was obeying. Was this really the person his father had asked for, specifically, nearly by name? And he'd heard so much in Liddell, but never about any mystic named the Finch, who shed feathers, who was a few planets short of a galaxy… How often had he listened to talk of mystics? Very infrequently. Mystics were not priests, held very little power in the O.Z., could perform no temple ceremony, and were often considered performers rather than spiritual leaders. Zero turned a deaf ear to them.

Yet he sat and wrapped his fingers round the mug handle. 'Is this really for me?'

'Really.' He looked quizzical. 'Didn't I say it was?'

'You did, but I—'

'Oh, that's a relief. I have a bad memory. Forget things. Often. Things often forgot.' The new mug of grog was lifted, his expression inviting his new friend to do the same. 'Let's drink to Mr Ridgestone and his fine local brewery establishment, shall we?'

Seeing nothing wrong with this toast, Zero clanked his mug next to the Finch's. They both sipped at the same time, set the glasses down at the same time, and burst into smiles at the same time.

'Good, isn't it! Ha!'

'It is good. I've never had it before.'

'Of course not. You're a southern lad. No, don't laugh: I hardly have to be a mystic to hear that accent. Let's see, let's see…' He fell away in thought, smoothing back a mess of stringy, thick hair. 'River dialect. And you've already got a tan.'

Zero's self-conscious glare went to the back of his hands. Golden, mottled in sun freckles. Was this a mystic or just a very careful observer?

'I'll say you're from Hastings or—what's the name of that town? Rookwood? Am I close at all?'

'Rookwood is the next village north from mine,' Zero answered casually. 'I'm from Liddell.' So far, however, this was unimpressive. Meeting a mystic ought to change the way one saw the world.

'Well, you already know I'm from the north, Stirbane, near the foothills. My clothes give it away. Perhaps that's why I wear them. You have a name?'

'Zero.'

The mystic snickered. 'Is that really your name?'

'No,' he laughed at the thought, 'no, it's a nickname.'

'What is your real name?'

'Can't tell you.'

'Why not?'

'Because it's ancient and long and ridiculous. Zero, I can tell you, is the starting syllable and the ending syllable—respectively.'

'Oh, what a way to play with my mind. I've known you two seconds, excuse the overstating, and I'm already captivated. How'd you wind up with a name, secret as it is, like that?'

'Mam lost a bet.'

He howled in laughter, a pleasing thing that made one forget troubles, as much as grog did for others. 'I don't doubt she did! A very big one! Well, I can't call you Zero. And I can't call you Dertien. That would be your uncle, am I right? He's an amicable man, isn't he? I liked him very much. Only sorry I brought him such awful news.'

He faded away for a moment, and Zero had the sensation of whirlpools circling. But the mystic breathed in sharply to return to himself.

'Name's Ansley. Ans being the first syllable, ly being the last. Ansley of Stirbane, one of my favourite nicknames. Followed en route by the Finch. And, of course, my least favourite: the Yellow Finch. And what shall I call you? Oh, that doesn't matter. I'm forgetting myself. A right name will pick itself, and monikers are so often flashes of a moment, coming and going, and they form themselves. It will come when it wants to. And you will probably call me Ansley. No—at first it will be Finch, out of fear—or respect and fear, fear and respect,' a pause for a breath, 'but when the fear abates, well, that leaves respect. And since you know I don't like to be called Finch, you'll call me Ansley. Don't want to hurt my feelings, do you? And by then, when you start calling me Ansley, I'll call you something else. You will never be Zero, not while I know you. Am I talking too much? My brother says I need to put some feathers in my mouth once in a while. He's a wit, he is. He's a writer for the libertine papers in the north. Someone told him—oh, come to think on it, I suppose it was Kiernan—well, whoever it was stupidly told my brother that he wrote well, and that was all he needed. Got it into his head he could write. Poor sod. Anyway, um… I've gone and lost my bookmark. Where was I?'

Zero could hardly imagine. 'Uncle said you were a little unusual. I just didn't expect— He also said you were a hermit.'

'A hermit!' The loud laugh again. 'Well, yes, that's true: I am a hermit. If a hermit is a synonym for a social outcast, though not necessarily a recluse by any means. But I knew you were coming, didn't I? I had to come out and meet you. Did you really want us to meet in the back of a tea shop? That's not very adventurous at all, is it?'

'Isn't it?'

'You're a serious sort. Ah, right, worried, aren't you, about your mam and dad. Pretty bad when you left them, weren't they?'

Zero opened his mouth to drag out this topic. His gumption failed. Nevertheless, Finch went on, fearing nothing the way Zero feared the death of his family.

'I can answer one of your questions right now, should you like me to. Oh you've loads of questions. I can read them. Like signs of magic upon you. Symbols.'

Finch scanned Zero's face, in starts and stops, as one reads words on a page. It unnerved but thrilled. What if there were words upon him to be read, as a story, as a fable unfolding?

Finch set his elbows on the table and leaned into Zero. Then he realised the candle was burning the end of his pointed chin. It was out of the way, and Finch restored his close proximity to Zero.

'Question one: What was your father doing asking about me, and what was he doing asking you to find me?' He scratched a spot on his head. 'Perhaps that's two questions. Or one question split into two separate but equal portions? Well, either way, it's mince, and I've pie, and I know which is best. Answer? That should be more than obvious: I know your father.'

Zero could not have been more surprised. 'How do you know my father?'

'I know lots of people. I've been travelling about since I was, let's see, let's see… Since I was eight, so a good eight annuals have passed since. I've been nearly everywhere in the O.Z. From the flood plains in the east to the Shifting Glaciers in the north. Never been to the Otherside—though I'd love to go. That is how I met your father. Joff, right? Joff Dertien. A good man. Fisherman. Always smells of river trout. He caught me one day when I fell into that river of yours, nearly drowned. He saved me. I thanked him by promising to return the favour, should he ever have need of it. Now you've come, I'm guessing he has need of it. The plague, right?'

Sentences that Zero had constructed while listening to Finch speak soon unravelled. The thought of the plague, of hearing someone else say it aloud, confirmed rudimentary suspicions. They did have the plague, after all. Zero had been wishing, longing, even secretly, for it to be nothing worse than influenza. Now, however, the truth must be accepted.

'I don't know anything,' Zero began quietly, 'about your powers, and I'm not really sure I believe you. How do I know you've not just stuffed some dyed feathers up the sleeves of your shirt, or up the legs of your trousers, and that's how they're able to appear like that? For all I know, you could be a phoney. All the same, I did just travel all the way here from Liddell—you know how far that is, or claim you know—worried sick about my parents. Less worried now for Nitten and Vier, my sister and brother, since neither of them seem to have caught it. But still worried. If you're willing, I'd like to guide you back to Liddell, to my parents, to my father. He asked for you. If you can't make them better, tell me now. I would rather get all the way home, tell him I couldn't find you, then bring you back, raise their hopes, and then see them…'

'You needn't finish. Drink up,' urged Finch. He used a pointer finger to inch the grog towards Zero. A moment of quiet passed, a quaff, completed again at a congruous second, and a consideration remitted. 'I don't know if I can save them. I can't promise that. Wouldn't even promise it to your parents. But I can tell you—I have tried to help others ground themselves against the plague. The results are inconclusive. Forty-nine percent fell ill again. Another fifty-one percent lived. How much of a hand did the determination of the spirit have in that? How much did I really do? All the same, I accept your offer to guide me to Liddell.'

'You're coming?' Zero's face brightened for a flash, a spark of hope, and then faded. 'We can hardly afford to pay you—'

'Did I ever say I wanted remuneration for this?'

Because Finch asked it so seriously, and Zero remembered that the mystic claimed a faulty memory, Zero answered. 'You didn't. But I thought—'

'By the suns, you think an awful lot. Your brain is a windy day. I don't want to be paid, thank you. A journey to the south will be enough for me. I've not been for annuals. My own father passed away this season but one.'

'I'm sorry.' Zero said it and meant it.

'Your sentiment is appreciated. All it did was cark me up a bit, that's all. And I had to forego a run at being catechumen to the Mystic Man—the Mystic Man, mind you—and I think that broke Father up far more than his dying did. Mother, too. I still mean to fulfil my obligation to the Mystic Man. But darkness,' the often enthusiastic voice lost its zeal, becoming colourless and hollow, 'from whatever direction it comes, will spiral—and rapidly—and coil—and that's the end of my knowledge. Well,' he burst into a cheerful grin as though he'd predicted nothing dolorous at all, 'when do you want to leave? How's morning sound? First light? Second light? You choose. You know the road better. Tell you what.' He flicked a hand, and an automaton cyborg answered with a bill. 'I'll settle this while you finish your grog. Then we'll head to the tea shop, I'll grab my few pithy personal chattels, and we'll head back to your uncle's.'

'But shouldn't I pay for the grog myself?'

'Money, honestly. Your brain may be a windy day, and littering the gutters in that blustery world of your aggrieved conscience are bright, shiny platinums. This is my treat. And, yes, you have deserved it. Always will.'

The last two words were misunderstood, or far too obscure for clarification. Zero let them hang in the air. Finch fished around his trouser pockets for enough coinage to cover the bill. Zero finished what he dared of the grog, it being a little on the sweet side for his liking, and felt obliged to help Finch gather the mess of belongings. A deck of cards was put into the pocket of the long greatcoat. The notebook and pen left in an inside pocket. He found a scarf, knitted loosely in hues of cereals, of ripening wheat, and knotted it at his throat. He laughed and said he wasn't used to the damp; Stirbane was mountainous, semi-arid, a rugged terrain…

Zero, leaving the restaurant in the company of the recognisable mystic, shot a look back at the little table. A yellow feather that had not been there before now rested on the abandoned chair.

He shouldn't have looked back. 


	4. Chapter 4

4.

The mystic was the sort who made himself at home wherever he was. Because he had no home. Zero concluded this on his own. If one is a wanderer, one is always at home. He sat on the floor, in front of the hearth in the sitting room. A careless spirit, constantly in flight, ready to sing at a moment's notice… Like the bird from which is nickname sprung… Caroline and Nimbus, two vain felines, were poised on his left and right hand. They watched him, eyes round as saucers, to drop more of the feathers they loved to bat about. The feathers seemed to appear, out of nothing, flimsy things as thin as air. One second nothing, another second there.

Nitten stopped beside her brother in the archway, between foyer and parlour. She eyed the mystic, lips buckled. In her hands was Zero's cloak, to be mended before the morn. He had snagged it on an intrusive bush somewhere along the Red Road.

'I can't believe he's a mystic,' Nitten stated. But the few yellow feathers dotting the braided hearth rug exemplified his status if his countenance did not. 'And I can't believe you're making us stay here. I'd much rather go home.'

'And I'd much rather you and Vier didn't get the plague and die,' he quipped. Nitten was often stunned to incapacitation at the rapid firing of his wit. He was coarse, but he was every inch veracious as well. 'We don't always get what we want.'

'Why are you so sure you won't get sick?'

He held her gaze steadily. 'Nittie, I've never been sick. I won't start now.'

-x-

'Is that true?'

The query came suddenly, into the dark, as Zero had just blown out the candle on the bedside cabinet. The garret room had no furniture to speak of, but a bit of empty space on the floor wide enough for Zero and the mystic to stretch and sleep. Starlight came through an oriel window. It caught the furry white back of Nimbus, kindly tucked beside Finch. Zero shoved his head against the pillow and slammed his eyes shut.

'Is what true?'

'That you've never been sick.'

One eye lifted and closed again. 'Maybe. Can hardly remember all the way back to when I was a baby, but otherwise… It is true. Never been sick. That's why Vier and Nitten are staying. I don't want to risk them—it just wouldn't be right, that's all. When our parents are better, I'll come back for them.'

'Of course you will.'

But it had a false chord of pacification. Something disconcerting and recreant lurked in every word a mystic uttered. Through no fault of his own, Finch wasn't trustworthy. He could comb a heap of lies and make it seem believable, as real as imagination permitted.

-x-

Zero woke at a touch on his shoulder, that of Finch, when the oriel window was still dark. Pale, groggy, worried, Zero enfolded himself in layers of clothing against the cold, damp fog of morning. Finch did the same; and, as far as Zero noticed from the corner of his eye, Finch had no feathers stuffed up his sleeves after all. But as they left the garret, Zero lingered, and saw a bit of white fluff on the floor.

The household rose briskly. Uncle Pip heated water on the stove, after he had Zero stoke the fire, and tea was passed to each. A peppery, sharp tea that seared the palate but brought clarity to the senses. Nitten crammed a few more orts into Zero's rucksack, and Vier, as he got going, began a swing of questions that made Zero smile so deliberately and thoroughly that his face began to ache. But at the farewells, held in the dreary, misty garden, a place like a dream, Vier's garrulous spirit wilted to despondency. He clung to his brother.

'Will we see you soon, Zero?'

'As soon as possible, Vier.'

As Nitten thought he would, Zero never looked back. It was bad luck.

-x-

Below a cinereous sky, two companions walked with purpose. Gatehill-on-Cleg was left behind them, and Zero commanded Finch across the moor, where the Red Road met them in its shattered confidence. Finch commented a remembrance of the Red Road, the fragments of brick half-interred in earth and debris of a coniferous forest. Once it had been made of perfectly formed squares, a mark of the sinuous avenue from the hem of Central City all the way to the Rip. Now it was a frayed landmark, a memory of better times, when the House of Pastoria ruled the realms. And not, as Zero said with undeniable reprehension, the ineffectual House of Gale…

The topic thus raised, it was discussed from tip to tip, as much as young men of fifteen and sixteen annuals of age could know details of regime. Zero found Finch to be a mind adherent to political relationships, particularly between that of the Royal House and the People of the Land. The latter phrase one that Zero saw italicised and capitalized in his mind's eye.

'It's my duty as a mystic to know the political views of the people,' Finch explained, but a subsequent sigh altered the subject. 'All mystics are like that. Only the Mystic Man himself has any political ramifications. And the rest of us, well… We know too much for our own good. Things are not well in the O.Z these days. The royal family members spend all their time holed up in one of their elaborate palaces. Meanwhile, crops, people, beasts are all suffering and dying, and those who wear a crown or tiara are forcing us to stick our heads in the sand. The plague has lessened some. But who is to say it won't start again?'

'It's possible,' acceded Zero, finding the voice of the Finch echoed his own beliefs of the current establishment. 'I pray the gods see my parents as the last of this plague.'

'As do I. You know the worst bit? The worst bit is what the people are saying about the Queen. The sign of the plague marks a steep decline of magic in the O.Z. This place used to be heaven, free of pestilence, but the plague… well…'

'If the Queen is losing her power, you would know. You're tied to the feel of this place.'

Finch regarded Zero keenly, emotions unbarred: disgust, resolve, hope. 'I'm not the only one.'

-x-

As the far moon rose, the suns sank, and it was Finch who directed Zero into a manger for the night. They had not quite made it as far as the Rip, though near enough to reach it in less than an hour the next morning, should they hurry. And they were not so far into the south that the frost in the air had gone. Zero mentioned foregoing the manger for a sylvan encampment, a place they could build a fire. The mystic shook his head and dived into the manger shadows.

'No fire tonight. And this is not the last we will see of cold weather.'

For a long while, neither slept. They lay on their backs, listening to the breathing of donkeys, the occasional noise from the horse.

Zero finally tumbled his thoughts to a chain of cognisable language. 'What does it mean, exactly, to be a mystic?'

'Lots of things.'

'Are you magical?'

'Not particularly. I have some powers, but nothing that influences the universe. Only thought can really do that.'

'So your magic is thought?'

'No… No, not really. Consciousness has its own ability. Without it, we would never be able to alter our perception. Perception, consciousness, thought: these are all the maxims of a mystic. It's a subtle vibration in the heart. An awareness of it.'

'It,' Zero repeated this stagnantly. It was a inflexible thing. 'An awareness of what?'

'Myself, you,' he made a light gesture to indicate Zero, 'the hay we're lying on, the relationship between the two moons, their relationship on the ocean… Everything. Vigilance and sensitivity to the outer planes, everything that exists beyond rudimentary thought. The grass is green. The sky is blue. Your eyes are grey. What's that mean? Very little. Go beyond it, and what's it mean? Everything. I could say that mystics tend to think too much,' he allowed Zero the privilege of snickering at this remark, foul of actual humour though it was. 'The truth is far more unknown—or incomprehensible. The grass may be green. The sky may be blue. And your eyes may be grey. But that's the physical. As spirits, we are neither so incongruent nor so congruous. We have a sense no one else has. That makes us… different. And, to some people, dangerous.'

Zero turned on his side, towards Finch, and already found a few scant feathers, black ones, between them. Finch picked up one, to toss it away, but its lightness failed to carry it far. In the sedentary peace of a little feather, Zero believed he found a visual explanation of what Finch had orated. Thoughts were light, light as feathers. But his will to move the feather was a weighted inclination of a spirit whose lightness equalled that of the feather… Or equalled nothing at all.

Finch pressed his finger against Zero's chin. 'That, my friend, is mysticism. More or less.'

-x-

The bridge was crossed, the Rip transcended. This rather mundane act, this banal activity of walking among others, as it was the only bridge within twenty-three miles, brought forth to Zero the very real intensity of the mystic. He would not have noticed if no one else had been on the same bridge that morning. But among market workers, shoppers, travellers, guards, a few men of the army, ruffian children orphaned by the plague, and all sorts of people, including a few domestic and farm animals, Zero was enlightened to the force of his travelling companion. For while Finch passed along pleasantries, when and if required, he moved very little from a straight course across the wide bridge of wood and stone. He did not have to veer from his path more than an inch, for everyone he passed moved from his path instead.

Zero's doubts as to the mystic's abilities and qualities had been on a slow and steady decline ever since that first feather seen on a tiny stage. And last night's conversation, coiling on into the night, till owls ceased to screech, had lessened mouldering reservations. Now…

He angled his head to his shoulder to the way they'd come. Among the padding feet of pedestrians, some goats, a man with a wagon of vegetables, was a soft downy spray of black, white and yellow.

Last night, he'd asked Finch whether he possessed the magic of shape-shifting. Finch had smirked, a dainty if arrogant thing with a life of its own, and denied, once again, possessing any thaumaturgy at all.

The feathers were a manifestation of his connection to a higher consciousness. 'All mystic's have something. Even the Mystic Man, the most powerful mystic in all the O.Z., has a manifestation. He changes light to colours, creates spectrums. One colour to the next, to the next, to the next, so on, so forth. But unless you're standing beside him, you would never notice. I have feathers. Or do the feathers have me? I always wondered that.'


	5. Chapter 5

5.

The crumbled foundation beneath their aching feet soon divaricated into an assortment of dirt passageways through thick forests. Finch paused at one such crossroad, and Zero was obliged to hang back. But when Finch hesitated, Zero's mood altered from pensive to anxious.

'This is the way home.'

'I'm not lost,' Finch replied. His eyes scanned a distant memory, a book of pictures whose pages he constantly flipped. 'I've been here before, remember? There's an ancient temple down this lane. It's half-buried now beneath rock and—and life. But it's still there. I should like to…' He cast a glare at Zero. 'You should go. It would benefit you.'

'Temples are for the ancient dwellers,' Zero reminded Finch.

With a conceding nod, Finch resumed the pace southward. He tucked a soft hand against Zero, at the base of the neck, in a bundle of flax-made fabric. 'Ancient dwellers gave us a lot. Including the foundations of our basic religion. When your parents are better, we'll come back here. It isn't so far, is it? From your house, I mean.'

'We're roughly four hours away.' Zero was more than relieved to see that a day's journey by foot fazed Finch very little. 'Will you really be around that long? To see that my parents get better, I mean.'

'As long as it takes. And it might take an hour. It might take months. Don't worry,' he snickered lightly, 'I don't have anything better to do.' The vague sensation nagged, however, and sent him into one of those searching looks that Zero was becoming familiar with. 'At least… I don't think I have. All the same—I should like to revisit the old temple. I believe it's for the gods of the southern element.'

'And that would be,' Zero paused, at first unable to remember, but Finch failed to fill in the blank. The answer arrived a moment later. 'Fire. Of course. I'd forgotten… What are the old temples like?'

'They choke on weeds and overgrowth,' began Finch, 'but they are otherwise substantially drowning in their own essence.'

'They're still sacred, you mean.'

'Indubitably. The most sacred places in the O.Z. You and your family, a long time ago, in the era that predates this one, would've brought gifts to the gods at the temple. What was the name of that temple? After one of the fire gods. Feachros? Wait, no, that's the god of—of—'

'Ravens and crows, watchers of the dead,' Zero supplied. He enjoyed Finch's impressed gleam. 'Don't you remember the old verse, mystic?

'"Feachros rode in a ship of stone,  
>Upon a sea of silver tears:<br>He kept a thousand crows,  
>He reigned a thousand ravens,<br>Black as night and sharp as stars;  
>His army of eyes and calls,<br>To keep abreast, always and true,  
>Those forever at his side,<br>Those forever at his heels:  
>The cries of the forgotten dead."'<p>

Finch's face contorted. 'Bit dreary, isn't it? Leave it to you to remember a verse so poignantly morbid.'

Zero had to laugh. 'You sound like Mam. Whenever I recite the prayers on the Cardinal Days, Mam tells me not to go wandering into the dark verses. She says I like them too much.'

'And I'm guessing you do.'

'They are imaginative. And beautiful. They're stories. And they're real. It's hard not to be moved by that. And Cardinal Days are for the resetting of the spirit, evaluation of the self, that sort of thing.'

'You know, Mr Dertien, I confess that the more I know about you, the more I find you an absolute bewilderment. A web. A contradictory web.' Finch leered as he paused, and Zero allowed this gaze to continue on. To be searched into the soul by a mystic was an experience. Zero felt himself unwind, like the fag-end of rope, beneath brown eyes mottled in green and gold, the colours of spring and autumn. And his eyes, his own, the pearlescent hues, the sombre mood, of winter.

Suddenly, Finch angled back, conclusions reached. 'Why don't you?'

'What?'

'Go to the Academy of Realm Sciences and study for the Stellate?'

They resumed a leisure pace, but Zero forced bite into it. He had not wanted to be read so clearly. But the inclination to hide something from a mystic was no weapon against excessive intuition. And nothing, Zero chose to believe, could hide something so enormous from the eyes of a friend.

'What good would it do?' Zero asked the question expecting no answer. He went on, sure that Finch would have something to say about it. He could say it in a moment. 'Academy is a commitment. Annuals. And unless my parents suddenly become younger, or Nitten finds herself an illustrious career, taking care of my family is my responsibility.'

'Priests have ties to the state, to the government, and they are paid handsomely.'

'If they get through Academy,' added Zero. 'And I'm not like you: I don't have the ability to see into people.'

'But you have the desire.' Finch ran a hand over his hair, drudging sloppily down a bumpy hill into a rocky spring. He paused atop a flat stone. Rancour was profound in his voice; affection remained clandestine, not yet dominant. 'Now I know what it is about you that I find so—so—irksome and annoying and dubiously enthralling.'

A protest cracked in Zero's throat, and he lifted his hand, as if to object, but the desire to battle this grew faint. The mystic had been willing to journey this far, for one man, Zero's father, a mere stranger, to whom he owed a favour. This pledge, ingratiatingly philanthropic, permitted the mystic to say whatever he chose. Zero thought listening was a due that must be paid, a non-monetary recompense for services rendered.

He grabbed Finch's elbow as he passed, and both of them hopped the creek. 'What's that then? My charming arrogance? Winning smile? My ability to hike for hours on end without a break?'

'Well, no,' repined Finch. 'But yes, that too. Why won't you go? It would mean so much to you. And you'd be good at it. Gods know the O.Z. is going to need more Stellars in the coming annuals. You'd be willing to sacrifice your own happiness for your family?'

'If my family suffered in any way, how would that bring me happiness?'

They kept walking, up another tor, and soon, Zero recalled, the forest would give way to a low, flat plain between two sets of undulating hills. And in that plain wound a wide river, dotted at its banks by a series of sinuous, narrow roads and little houses. The town of Rookwood, and, south two more miles—home.

'And I suppose,' Finch went on, his voice both teasing and angry, 'that you never told your family of your desire for the priesthood? Of course you haven't! Because they would make you go, if that was your will.'

'It isn't my will! And could we stop talking about this?'

'We are going to talk about it, because I want to understand why someone with your talent and interest and-and—your hope in the world should throw all of it aside! And for what? What are you going to do that could save your family from poverty, while, identically, fulfils your unique qualities?'

Finch rolled back on his heels, expression astonished, chuckle of the flabbergasted sort. 'I don't believe it. You're going to join the army!'

'I'm what?' Zero gaped. 'I'd never… The army? But…'

_But the army._

The army of the O.Z., the Royal Guards of the Realms. Why hadn't he thought of that before? A steady pay, a job that would keep him occupied, and there he might find a lurking talent, something that hadn't shown in the idyllic life he'd so far led. And Uncle, he was already in the army, a captain—and wouldn't that help? Wouldn't it make his father happy, please his mother, and keep their life content? He could live cheaply in the army itself; he had no wants, no needs but the necessities. Every q-plat that could be sent to his parents would be.

'Then maybe Vier can go to school,' he reasoned aloud with Finch. 'One of us should. It won't be me. I can guarantee that.'

'You're built for more than the army. Why are you fighting this?' questioned Finch.

Zero shot him a devastating look, a gage, a battle line. 'Why are you? Three days ago, you didn't have any idea who I was—and now you're trying to change my outlook on life. Is that what mystics do?'

'Excuse me, priest, but I _did_ know of you three days ago. I met your uncle, remember? Told him to expect company, family sick. A trio, a trinity—four feet and a ghostly set behind—six passengers in total. One of them on the path to enlightenment. The light within, the darkness without.'

Finch pressured Zero's shoulders, tucked a hand against a cool cheek, and Zero was comforted by the affection. Anger fizzled. Resentment sputtered.

'Don't let it become the other way round, that's all I'm asking. That's all anyone who knows you would ever ask. Let it always be light within, darkness without. Never, ever turn it around: Darkness within, light without. The gods would fall to their knees and weep at the loss of you.'

Zero started away, but Finch held him back.

'If you won't listen to me now, just hear my words and listen to them later. Wait,' Finch commanded, holding fast to the lapels of Zero's coat, the knot of the hooded over-cloak. 'Just wait. Wait until you're older, until you're seventeen. Do not do anything before then. You cannot sign up for the army until you're seventeen, anyway. Though there are ways around it, of course. Lying about your age, for one thing, so easy to do—easy for those who can tell such lies. But your path is obscure, a trail covered beneath leaves and forest miscellany: you cannot see it very clearly. The wind will come, and the snows, bleak times, and it will clear the road before you. One way or another, priest. Light or dark. Just wait.'

The mystic's intensity tugged at Zero. He set his hand over Finch's, squeezing, nodding assurance and acceptance. And while Finch spoke often in incomprehensible riddles, at a rapid pace that nearly slurred, every word made an invaluable impact on Zero. He nodded again, more forcefully, and Finch finally relaxed.

'I promise,' Zero vowed solemnly, 'I promise I'll wait. While I may not be a mystic, I know there's something going on in our world. Something is happening. It's changing too quickly. Or did you not notice, Ansley, that we're this far below the Rip and yet it's started to snow?'

Finch lifted his chin and searched the sky. Zero mimicked. Fluffs of white touched the lids of his eyes, soft as kisses, and he batted lashes. At first, he couldn't believe it. These were feathers, only feathers, a hundred, a thousand, a heaven-full… But he held out his hand, as did Finch, and watched the white flakes melt against his heat.

'Snow,' he mumbled, 'snow, here… In the south.'

Zero sped ahead, to end this last tunnel of woods, and pounded his feet to a stop. Finch parked at his side. A peaceful zenith, the infamous Jiensail Valley, with its eponymous river circuitous through villages and piebald landscape, stretched from the tips of their toes, all the way to the horizon. But the magnificent view was studded with wisps of grey clouds, hanging low, as a filmy veil, threatening to swallow in a gulp and breath of freeze and snow. Zero stared, the madness of uncertainty, the hysteria of fear gripping him so terribly, so absolutely.

'Ansley,' the transition from mystic to friend came naturally, there at the pinnacle of the changing world, 'what does this mean?'

'I don't have an answer, priest. But I think,' he watched the snowflakes perch on Zero's shoulders, in his hair, and wondered how shock could look so peaceful in someone so grounded, 'I think it's the beginning.'

'Of what, I can only imagine.'

Finch brushed off his head and put up the hood. The snow fell at a thick rate. They would have to scrape through it on the way to Liddell. He swept flakes from Zero's soft hair, and this seemed to wake him. Finch pulled up the hood, patted it, and tried to assure his new friend with a twisted smile. It was watery, thin, a bit bleak, but it was reassuring.

'Priest,' the mystic told Zero. 'I knew it would be found.'

'Ansley,' Zero responded, glancing back and forth between the mystic's hypnotic, rather humorous eyes. 'Ansley of Stirbane.'

Two different people had crossed the Rip of the O.Z., and two different people had emerged from the woods to the Jiensail Valley. They were introduced all over again. Not as strangers but as friends. 


	6. Chapter 6

6.

The snow in the south, an unheard of feat in the seventh month of the O.Z. annual, transformed into the least of their worries as they arrived in Rookwood. Women were in shawls, men in heavy coats, and all around buzzed a rueful undertone. Ansley and Zero kept near one another, to fend off the cold, and this vibration within the denizens that something was horribly awry.

Zero registered relief when he stopped scanning the crowds at a face he recognised. Running towards a young woman with a sheet of golden locks, standing beside a young man that could only be her twin, Zero called out two names, Dorrie and Drew.

'Zero!' cried Dorrie, astonished to see him. 'What the devil are you doing here? Oh, hello!' She noticed Ansley, an odd creature dressed in the ways of the North. Ansley bobbed his head at her in a congenial greeting, nothing more. Quickly, Dorrie handed Zero one of the pamphlets she and her brother were busily handing out. 'We've just heard the news. Did you two hear about it yet?'

With Ansley over his shoulder, Zero read the pamphlet. A lot of big text at the top, smaller print at the bottom. Zero shook his head and glanced at Ansley, but when he spoke it was to Dorrie and Drew.

'The king consort has gone?'

'Vanished!' said Drew. He lit a pipe and shivered in his tartan cloak. 'We suppose it happened at least two days ago, the day after, you realise, that they buried the princess.'

'Oh gods,' mumbled Zero, 'I'd forgotten about the funeral.'

Drew and Dorrie stared at him. Forget of the princess's funeral? But it had been a grave affair for the entirety of the O.Z., and to forget… Blasphemous! Nihilism! Anarchy!

Ansley shifted his weight and felt the need to defend Zero. 'Forgive him, friends, as he's gone through an upheaval of his own. The doings of the royal family are not part and parcel with his mind just now. So what are the two of you? I've not met anyone yet who stands about in town and hands out news pamphlets. Shouldn't newspapers handle this sort of story?'

'The newspapers are shutting down,' replied Drew. 'Particularly in Central City. Only small-time press can get the word out now. The true word.'

'Ha, that's what I mean. Small-time press, of course! You're part of a growing trend,' Ansley said. 'I know people like you. Kiernan Cain started his paper this past annual, and it's the only one in the east and north anymore. But he calls himself a literary figurehead. Some call him a rabble-rouser. But that little paper of his is the gospel of the O.Z. according to many. It's the truth behind whatever propaganda we're being fed by the House of Gale that week.'

'We've heard of him,' Dorrie admitted. 'That's how me and Drew came up with the idea. Thought the south could use its own paper. Who are you then, friend? Some sort of traveller?'

'A rebel voice from the north?' counter-questioned Drew. He eyed the raiment again. Definitely from the north.

'Sorry,' Zero apologised quickly. 'This is my friend Ansley. Ansley of Stirbane.'

'I do my share of wandering, even once or twice wayfaring, though I don't like to brag.' Ansley gave this commentary to Dorrie. 'Do either of you know what happened, as in the specifics, to the king consort?'

The siblings shook their heads. Ansley had thought as much.

'This is calamitous indeed,' he uttered. But he sensed Zero's turbulence. They'd already tarried too long, and news, at this point, was scarce. 'As long as he's not dead, I suppose there's still hope he'll be found and returned.'

'We'll keep an eye out for him,' Drew said sarcastically. 'I don't know that I remember what he looks like.'

'He's fair,' Ansley told him. 'Tall. Sandy hair. Dark eyes.'

'Oh, dark eyes,' cooed Dorrie. 'That's a relief to know! For a second, I thought you might've been describing Zero!' She brought them all into short-lived grins. The bonhomie lapsed.

'This is going to be bad,' Drew summarised, indicating the king consort's disappearance, coming so close after interring his daughter. 'Bad, for a very long time.'

'Don't lose hope,' Zero told them. 'Beneath all this snow, spring is waiting. There is no perpetual winter, not in the O.Z., not while people remain loyalists.'

'Autocracy is all well and good,' Drew said, 'but I don't know if I believe the remiss Queen is capable of handling the conscientious populace of her realm. It hurts me to say that, Zero, you know it does. Have I ever spoken against the Queen? I adore her, as Dorrie and I both do. But facts are facts. The Queen's empire is failing. Ever since the plague… And then her daughter's death… Now the consort's disappearance. It does not bode well for her and her establishment.'

'But you're forgetting something, Drew,' said Zero, the authority in his voice edging towards anger. How could they forget? Was it lost in them somehow, as the burial of the young princess had been lost to him? 'If the Queen vacates her throne, or is forced to do so by usurpation, this snow we're seeing now will stay round for good. And we can expect more turmoil. The magic will leave the O.Z.'

'The magic's already leaving the O.Z.,' countered Dorrie. 'Zero, it _is_ snowing! Crops are failing… People are dying.'

'I know!' He huffed after the outburst and apologetically raised a hand. 'I know it looks that way, Dorrie, but it isn't gone just yet. It's only… hiding. Protecting itself. Now, hand out your pamphlets if you want, form a resistance group, take your issues to the Assembly of Realm States if that's what you want to do. But remain a loyalist. Only a member of the House of Gale may sit on the throne. If this line is broken, if an impostor reigns, the citizens of the Realms will lose their autonomy. And it will be more than yourselves that will suffer.'

Drew remained calm, despite a rising disagreement with Zero's philosophy. 'The Queen is an outsider who cannot understand her people. She sequesters herself from her own policies, from her own people, and has no idea of the troubles we're undergoing. The rich are getting richer. The poor are only getting poorer. The armies are gathering to fight an enemy that hasn't shown its face yet. Do you know who they're going to fight, Zero?'

Zero nodded. He knew. He thought he knew as soon as he'd stood, with Nitten and Vier, looking down at the bustling encampment in Enscommon. 'They are waiting to snuff out anyone who forms an allegiance against the monarchy—members of a yet unformed resistance. I know.' Fiercely, he grabbed Ansley by the wrist and dragged him along. 'Good luck to the two of you.'

They had left behind Dorrie and Drew only a few paces before Ansley spoke, after several probing glances at Zero's profile.

'I never pictured you having rebels as friends.'

'They're not my friends,' said Zero sternly. 'They're acquaintances, second cousins on my mother's side—but not friends.'

Ansley snorted. 'Can't imagine why, what with your suddenly hostile explosion of loyalty back there. You know the first thing the army will destroy, Zero?'

'If they're smart,' answered Zero, 'they'll destroy all the printing presses.'

'Correct. Kiernan Cain has already gone into hiding. Oh, don't give me a funny look like that—as if you're surprised I know the guy! He already knows what the rest of us are still coming to terms with. He won't be silenced so easily, believe me! You'd have to meet him to understand—or one of his brothers. Then you'd know the spirit of rebellion. But the people will always have a voice. They will need someone to lead them.'

'If you're suggesting I do it, you can forget it, Ansley. I'm going to join the army.'

'Ever the royalist!' chuckled Ansley. But it amused him. Zero, sensing this, allowed his defences to abate. Zero bumped his shoulder to Ansley's.

'It's not the Queen I approve of, if you want my honest insight.'

'Honest insight!' echoed Ansley. 'From you! I'm all ears!' He held up his hand, turning it at the wrist while his fingers opened. A feather appeared. 'And all feathers! Tell me, priest, why you believe so little in the Queen but remain an apologist to the House of Gale?'

'They are an ancient line,' said Zero reasonably, 'a direct light from the gods is in them. I cannot refute their magical power. And I don't want to see what happens when that power is turned against the people. Could you walk a little faster, Ansley? Honestly, you're a slug. We're almost home.'

'You've been a strong sort these last few days, priest.'

Zero had no notion of where this sentence of praise had originated, but he was nonetheless pleased to hear it. While he shivered and shook on the inside, ill and sleepless with worry, he had shown little of it—if none at all. 'Priest's prerogative. And I'm with a mystic: that's comforting enough for me.'

Diffident suddenly, Zero's feet, already toe-deep in cold, white fluff, hesitated. His mouth twitched, watching the mystic sledge ahead, wheat cloak over gold coat, and wondered what he'd been waiting for back in Gatehill-on-Cleg. Was it Zero he'd been waiting for, or just a chance to help another lost soul? And then Zero slipped ahead, catching Ansley up, and understood no difference existed between the two. A mystic had been waiting for this lost soul; he'd been waiting for Zero.

-x-

The familiar buildings of Liddell were whitewashed behind the snow, rendering them almost unrecognisable. Zero found the streets stuffed with denizens. And, much like Rookwood, the topic of conversation surrounded the disappearance, peculiar and unexpected and hurtful as it was, of the king consort, the one the Queen called Ahamo. The people knew him as Consort Gale, should they ever be bold enough to speak of him by name. Zero heard none of this noun as he wended through the town. He was stopped often, people asking about him, and once or twice someone spoke of his parents' condition… The hex mark left on the front door would've been seen by someone in town, and word spread quickly, a rumour always a plague itself. He shied from this talk, waving his hands to purify it, and the people were sympathetic, and Zero's heart pounded in his throat… The way they looked at him…

Zero trundled onward, ever onward. It was bad luck to look behind.

-x-

A looping road at the south end of town saw his first distraction. A farmstead, a wide paddock that crept in a descent to forests and a rippling creek. But as soon as he crossed the gate and whistled, he heard two sets of booming hooves. Ansley watched, mesmerised, as a horse and donkey, plain little creatures, drew themselves affectionately towards Zero. And Zero, as Ansley had realised, who was not commonly demonstrative with his emotions, petted and coddled the furry quadrupeds. Their backs were downy white. Zero removed his cloak and laid it over the horse's back. Then, finding the resources of strength, augmented by sheer will and nerves, he hopped upon the blanket.

Ansley paused beside the horse. It would not be right for him to ride such a baleful-looking beast without a proper introduction. It would be rude. 'Greetings, pretty one. What's your name?'

Zero dropped his hand to the mane. 'Her name's Diat.'

'Diat,' Ansley bobbed his head, 'I approve of this name.' He petted the horse but looked up at Zero. 'You give her this name, priest?'

Zero didn't answer. Of course he had, but…

'Diat, the name of the goddess who wandered the planet and gave it colour. That's so very like you! Well,' this to the kind horse, 'thank you for allowing me to ride upon you, noble madam of steeds unique. Come on, priest, give us a lift-up.'

Ansley took the proffered hand, gripped it tight, and, with some grunts and struggle, finally settled behind Zero. The whole world looked different from this height, and Ansley, overcome with the new view, a slight fear of falling off, did not let go of Zero's hand. Zero waited until Ansley was comfortable. A silence of three seconds, and Zero's heart tightened. Nearly home, nearly home… And yet…

'Are you all right, Ansley?'

The mystic had paled. But he squeezed Zero's hand. 'I'm all right. For a moment, I thought I heard—but, no, I didn't hear anything. Will the donkey follow us?'

Zero petted the thin fingers to his waist, and brought round the other. He nodded at the sleepy-eyed donkey. 'He'll follow. He and Diat are close friends. Never one place without the other.'

The implications of this line, whether or not meant as allegory, prompted Ansley into a stunted process of self-conference. They were out of the paddock, and Zero was gone from Diat only long enough to latch the gate, and by then Ansley had formed his ambulating thoughts to intrepid verbosity.

'The donkey's name, would it happen to be Thiatu? Thiatu, the god who followed behind Diat, in our world before there was colour. And Thiatu blessed the colour with light—and cursed it with darkness. And in the light and darkness came the scents of flowers, and texture, and gave layers to the realms. Thiatu split the outer realm into four quadrants, four colours, representing the directions of the four wind-lovers. South, the red wind. North, the purple wind. East, the blue wind. West, the yellow wind. And wherever Diat strayed the longest, her paintbrush saturated the land deep to its roots. Thiatu pursued her, ever and on, and they are said to still flow through the realms, riding on the back of the cardinal winds. They follow winter, grey and colourless winter, like your eyes, and paint it in the blooms of spring. And bring back the birds.'

He held up a yellow feather for Zero. It was accepted, examined. A feather like any other. Zero had never held one of Ansley's feathers before. But it was plain. Outwardly unaltered from feathers of southern yellow finches, those that whistled and called among the meadow grasses where he used to lie and dream and pretend…

'Ansley?'

'H'mm?'

'You talk a lot.'

'You're just not used to it, that's all, oh you of taciturn disposition. And you missed the point of my parable.'

'No,' Zero shook his head and tucked the feather into his coat pocket, 'I don't think I did. I was only stalling.'

'Stalling?'

'I'm not sure which one I am: Thiatu or Diat?'

'Oh, you're Thiatu. You're a being of layers. Zero Dertien: a man of many layers.'

'That makes you Diat. Ansley of Stirbane: artist of the realms. I've never really had a friend before.'

'Neither have I.'

'Just my siblings.'

'Ditto.' Ansley set his chin against Zero's shoulder, hands tight at his friend's waist. 'Your heart's beating like a drum, excuse the pitiable simile. But it is. We must be getting near home.'

'There's the river.' Zero pointed through the snowy underbrush, to a smooth expanse of black that was the river reflecting a leaded sky. 'Liddell is about a half-mile ahead. And we live in the southern part, about a half-mile outside of town. We're within a mile of home. The road flattens out just ahead. If you think you can hold on tight enough, I'd like to go a little faster.'

'You'd better do it, then.' Ansley prepared himself, as well as he knew how, having so little experience riding horses but for some scant lessons in his fleeting childhood. 'If you don't, priest, I think your heart might explode.'

The hill was descended, and Diat's momentum never slackened. Zero clicked his tongue, loosened the reins, and felt Ansley scrunch up against him in dread covered by anticipation. The hooves thundered. Liddell came into view. Zero commanded Diat through the village, a straight street whose pedestrians moved frantically from the rushing horse and donkey.

Ansley didn't relax a muscle until the crescendo became a decrescendo. He opened his eyes at a strange, hollow clopping of the Diat and Thiatu. An arching wooden bridge through a ream of white-trunk trees and verdure of ferns and gallenwood bushes. Once they passed the stream, the meadow returned, vast and wide and drowned in snow. Zero's heart slowed its pace, nearly to a standstill, until the house overcame his sight.

Zero slipped from the horse and dashed towards the faded front door. Home! His legs couldn't carry him fast enough.

He threw open the door, not knowing what he'd find. He thought his throat would erupt with the pain and pressure, the fear, the remorse… He was blind until he faced the bed where he'd left his parents. Blind until realising they were not there. Blind until he saw a candle burning on the cabinet, an oil lamp lit, and another, and another… And in the kitchen came a scent of herbs and soup. A shadow loomed in the open entryway, Ansley, and he shared a bewildered look with Zero.

Finally, a voice called from the back garden.

'Who's there?'

Confused, nearly ready to sob, Zero stood before the emerging figure, covered in a familiar cloak, a familiar tress of auburn hair curled down a shoulder. She pulled back her hood and gaped at him as he gaped at her.

'Zero!'

'Mam…'

In tears of relief and celebration, Zero pulled his mother into his arms and held tightly. She laughed, wept, kissed his cheek, ruffled his hair, looked at him, hugged him again. At the end of this exposition, used her apron to dry her eyes.

'You're home,' she started. 'Oh, I've been so worried!'

'You're all better! But I thought—how did you get better? And where's Dad?'

'I got better yesterday. I'm still weak, and Mrs Hagglethorne has been… has been helping… She brought us medicine, and she…' Her eyes were a continuous trickle, and a faraway gloom entered and shrouded her happiness. 'Zero… Zero…'

He heard the words she didn't say. Words by the centesimal. As monody. As silent epitaphs. He slipped into a cold embrace. His father… His father…

Ansley came to his side, unable to do more than share this grief. As Zero's mother held him close, Ansley suffered no moment of feeling out of place, as though he shouldn't be there, like he didn't belong. He touched the back of Zero's head, then the woman he had not yet met, and tried to soothe their agony with his presence.

But one question nagged. Why, if the gods saw fit to heal Zero's mother and take his father, had Ansley of Stirbane, the Yellow Finch, come at all? 


	7. Chapter 7

7.

It was a cold evening. Cold that snuck into the house through every miniscule opening. The fire behind the grate roared just as robustly as the wind across the plains.

'Wind we have out here on the prairie,' Mam stated, eyeing Ansley with kindness, sympathy. 'Snow… Snow we have very little of.'

The back door opened, with an incursion of swirling flakes and a gnash of angry air. Zero left his armload of wood on the hearth. His cloak was left on a hook near the door. Mam poured him a cup of tea. It warmed his insides, but did nothing for his weariness.

'Diat and Thiatu are all right,' he announced blandly. It seemed so unimportant. Yet he had roused himself to care for them, to feed the chickens, to check on the geese. Strange how death made everything unimportant, yet the senses were sharpened. 'There's a foot of snow. I think it's letting up. But the wind…'

'I don't mind the wind so much,' Ansley said. 'It's a companionable wind. It speaks, tells stories.' He spoke for the sake of saying something. The same question he had about himself did Zero also have. Why had he come? What was the point behind it?

They asked each other this question, never aloud, not yet, but quietly, in long regards across the table.

Zero helped his weary, weakened mother. She would never be the same, he recognised that. The sickness had taken some of her vitality, but the loss of her husband had stolen all hint of her inherent jollity. Afterward, she became vacant at times, often dreamy, and it was Nitten who had to run the household, for fear tasks and chores would never be completed. But that night, the night of his return, amid his own heartache, Zero told her to rest, to let him take over. He'd do this, he'd do that, if she would stop over-exerting a shattered strength, a recuperating spirit.

She went to sleep easily. Zero tucked the blankets around her shoulders, padding her down with extras nicked from Vier's bed. Ansley, surreptitious and curious, observed from the hall as Zero tended the recovering invalid. Even with her, pleasant and matronly as she was, Zero was reserved.

'This is my sister's room,' Zero said to Ansley as they entered Nitten's loft in the tresses above. It was accessed by a rope ladder, and Ansley popped up just at the tail-end of Zero's declaration. The mattress was tick and hay, comfortable, warm, without springs but merely set against the planks. Its pillow was a display of Nitten's childhood dolls, relics of olden days, of fond old playmates, that she would keep always. Ansley set these gentle, doleful ladies aside, rolled back the covers, a herringbone quilt the best of all, and made himself at home. Zero left the lantern beside the bed. Before he could turn away, Ansley's hand gripped his wrist.

'Why did I come?'

The look of pain and suffering across Zero's features worsened the thickness of this enquiry. Zero felt, void of absolute reason, that he knew the answer.

'Mystics go where they're needed. Your extended level of consciousness, didn't it tell you that?'

'Listen, priest,' Ansley did not let go, 'you are self-sufficient. More than capable of walking alone the path we just took together. You are the last person in the realms who has need of me.'

'I never said I had need of you.' He knew the outline of this conversation, knew it subconsciously, and that made this confession dire, and the sting in his heart grew bearable beneath the stable foundation of friendship.

Ansley smirked. 'You think I needed you.'

Zero nodded. 'As Diat needs Thiatu. Every artist has a canvas, Ansley.'

'You're not empty, colourless and grey.'

'Aren't I?' An eyebrow arched, taunting the mystic, teasing the friend. 'Maybe every friendship doesn't start out as a parable, Ansley, but some of them must.'

'And maybe ours isn't a friendship at all.' Ansley let go and dimmed the lantern. 'Guess what? I'll see you in the morning.'

Unable to be dismissed so effortlessly, Zero remained. This conversation hadn't ended. So few of their conversations ever had an absolute end. It always went on, as a circle they cavorted, an annular of dialogue again and again. 'Even the morning after that. We'll be snowed in for a while.'

'When your uncle arrives with Nitten and Vier, I'll go.'

'Where?'

'That temple I told you about. The gods have to be told what's happening here in the O.Z. If you won't tell them, I will.'

'Maybe they already know.'

'Priest,' and Zero heard him rustling beneath the covers, and saw a pale hand catch light from the hole in the floor, a flash in a brown eye, 'it's snowing, we're below the Rip, and it's the merry month of May. Before you go to sleep tonight, pray your gods can see snow where they are. I have a feeling they can't.'

The silence cloistered them and rendered obdurate their feelings. Zero, on knees and elbows, tilted to Ansley.

'I'll go with you.'

The eyes flashed again, deep like a bird's, endless like a waterfall. 'To the temple? Well,' and now a brief grin, succour to Zero's taut strings, 'watch me not stop you. But your family might.'

'Not this time.'

Now the conversation would cease for the night, to be picked up again in the morning.

-x-

After the fifth day, routine settled. The sixth day saw a patch of cerulean in the southern horizon. And the seventh day was filled with the shine of the suns. Snow melted, and everywhere was the happy sound of trees dripping, gutters gurgling, a sense of coming cleanliness.

Mam recovered her strength, pampered and cosseted by both Zero and Ansley, whom she had adopted as another son. She had taken his announcement that he was a mystic in the calm, unobtrusive manner of her character. And while it never tired her to see the feathers scattered about the house, she found Ansley and Zero's relationship of a considerably rakish dynamic. Zero, whom she had never seen fond of anyone outside of Nitten and Vier, of his own clannish roots, was absurdly fond of Ansley. And the mystic, soft of voice to Zero, but coerced into raucousness if teased, showed a love that exponentially increased. Some forms of love, she decided, watching the two boys slog through the slush around the barn, never died.

This became far more evident when, on the ninth day, a messenger from the village arrived at the Dertien farm. He left Ansley with a heavy gold envelope. He could not tip the messenger with a monetary unit, but Mam paid him in a fresh loaf of bread, all the happier with it than a q-plat.

Ansley stood as he read the letter, then he meandered into a chair. He held the letter to Zero. 'Always knew I'd be easy to find. It's hard to hide from anyone when you leave a trail of feathers behind you. Even the snow,' he shook his head, 'was no help to me this time.'

Quietly, severe of eye, Zero accepted the missive. He had a feeling it was the kind of document that would take Ansley away from him. Maybe not forever. But forever was always a possibility. It was a formal letter, a letterhead and address at the top, done in gothic typeset.

'The Guild of Realm Mystics,' uttered Zero. 'They want you to go to Central City?' His summary of the letter's contents, rambling as they were, were simple but foundational. He passed the letter to Mam, and she skimmed it but for the last paragraph.

'The Queen is asking that all mystics report to the Guild headquarters in Central City.' Astonished, anxious for Ansley, she set the letter down and sighed. 'You'll have to go. If the Queen is asking for you—it will be for an important reason. Perhaps she's hoping you'll be able to help her find her husband.'

'The Queen has the Tin Men for that,' spat Zero. 'Mystics cannot be used as guide dogs, Mam!'

'I go where I'm needed. It's all right, Zero. Apparently I'm not needed here any longer. I'm sorry we won't get to the temple. I was looking forward to that. It'd be worthless to ask you to go by yourself, wouldn't it? You won't go now.'

'How could I?'

'You're too afraid the gods might hear you.'

'I'm afraid the gods might hear me scream.'

'Boys,' Mam said sternly. She stood between them, eyes moistened. 'It is not the time, now or ever, to say something to each other you'll always regret.'

'I'm not worried about that, Mam,' Ansley explained. Mouth pursed to a fine line, he rubbed his face wearily. 'Things are moving faster than I thought they would.'

Mam put the letter into its envelope. 'You'll have to leave immediately, Ansley.'

'No,' he voiced adamantly, 'I'm not leaving until Nitten and Vier return. It will take me a week or more to reach Central City, and I know it'll take another month for them to hunt down all the mystics of the realm. The Guild has a powerful reach, and powerful tools at their disposal to hurry their whims and wishes, but this herding will take time. And gods know what they want us in one place for…'

Absolute fear scorched through Zero. Whatever the Guild wanted, if they should huddle all mystics to one city, one town, with the monarchy of the O.Z. beginning to topple, he feared that this would be, like the death of his father, another insurmountable grief.

-x-

Uncommonly, Ansley rose at first light. Drowned in his cloak, he took care of the barn chores. Diat and Thiatu were pleased to see him, and made murmurs of greeting. The morning was frosty, but the unmistakable redolence of spring hung as hope in the humid air. After several conversations, if rather one-sided, with horse and donkey, Ansley returned to the house. Mam was up, a woman he would've never dreamed he'd ever call Mam, but that had never been anything else, never Mrs. Dertien, not even Zasha. She'd prepared porridge, and left a steaming clay bowl in Ansley's cool hands. He looked at her and heard himself ask:

'What is it?'

Because it was something. A hesitancy. A topic that had been coming for quite some time. A willowy thing, indefinite, proposing, able to stop the strongest warrior where he stood. Intuition failed him but for this subtle combination of phrases, that it was important, that it had to do with Zero…

'I want to ask you something,' Mam began. 'And you don't have to answer if you think I'm prying, but it's only that I don't want to see him hurt…'

Now he understood. And when she asked, he found no surprise. He was able, with all the vigour and reason that such an abstract emotion as love transferred to magniloquence, to convey the supreme extensiveness of his brief friendship with Zero.

-x-

Late in the afternoon, an hour near gloaming, a trio crossed the bridge and entered the Dertien land. Nitten raced through the garden loam, waving frantically at Diat and Thiatu, and Vier shouted their names. Uncle Pip jogged behind them, through the last remaining knells of slush, across sloppy, reedy ground, to the house. But the front door, void now of the hexing sticks, was thrown open before they reached it. Calls and hugs and kisses were aplenty. And, behind it all, a subdued emotion, a sorrow so new that it had not yet found its voice. A reunion not as they had wished, but a reunion minus one, and that was better than a reunion of none.

-x-

Nitten did not wish to oust Ansley from her under-roof chamber; it had been his for the last week and a half, and he was comfortable there. But he gratefully handed it back to her, just as she had left it, old dolls and herringbone quilt. That night was balmy enough to allow him a space in the barn. Under the cover of darkness, with the far moon fattening and the near moon waning, Ansley removed himself, and his things, once the household showed signs of tiredness.

Zero tracked him down, lantern bright against the beams, just as Ansley was preparing to exit. But Zero held him from breaking away. While he had his family, Zero was torn about the prospect of losing a friend.

'I can't believe you're going.' His intonation was sewn tightly by humiliation and hurt, a ripple of jealousy and agony. 'And I can't believe you were going to leave without saying goodbye.'

'But that's not really what's bothering you. Because you know that if you were me, in my position, you would've done the same thing.'

Zero let this sway into oblivion without a retort. The poison of fact numbed his tongue. Ansley smacked him at the shoulder, a brief brace, and a twist around him. Zero followed, out the door, into the garden, the slosh and squish of their feet the only sound.

'What bothers me is that you're so willing to submit to their command. Why are you going?'

'If I don't,' Ansley's brow furrowed in confusion and annoyance, 'they'll hunt me down, to the ends of the realms if they have to, and take me away in chains. How is that any more heroic than surrender? And you know how easy I am to find. If I go now, it'll be over soon.'

'Look, Ansley, I don't know what's going on in this country of ours, I have no idea. But it isn't good. I can't shake off this feeling that once you leave, you'll never be heard from again.'

'I have to take that risk,' Ansley said, 'and so do you. Yes, it's probably a ruse to arrest me—me and all the other mystics. Why? I don't know. If I am allowed pen and paper, yes, I'll write to you. Will I be able to tell you what I know? Absolutely not. I will not fight against the establishment.'

'The system is collapsing; there is no establishment worth dying for! Not anymore! What good will it do? Why would they kill the mystics? Except the Mystic Man, of course! Lob off his head and they'll have instant rebellion, instead of this slow and steady undercurrent of hatred! And you're bowing to their whim! YOU!'

'STOP YELLING AT ME!' Ansley yelled back.

Silence, save for the panting of breath from their laden lungs.

'Please,' begged Ansley, 'just stop yelling at me. This isn't my fault. It's just the way things happen.'

Zero chewed his lips and huffed, disgusted at the rise of tears. Over the post of the paddock fence, Zero let the lantern hang. His arms folded, tightly at first, and then— He took a long step and engulfed Ansley in a tight embrace.

'You're the only friend I've ever had,' Zero whispered, 'and you're going to become another casualty of this—whatever it is.'

'I believe the word eluding you is war, priest. This is the beginning of it. If I could say something right now that would make you go to Academy and join the Stellate, I would say it. But I know your path now, so do you.'

'The army's the only place I can fight against whoever's doing this.'

'Remember your promise?'

Zero nodded. 'I'll wait until I'm seventeen. But what I do in the year and half before then, well, that's undecided.'

'It's a long walk to Central City.' Ansley rubbed away a drip from his eyes and nose with the sleeve of his coat. He brushed a tear from Zero's cheek.

'Didn't know having friends would hurt so much,' said Zero. 'Now I remember why I didn't have any before.'

The thought unsteadied Zero. He studied Ansley in the lamplight, a touch of silver from the moons, a gentle umbra of spirit around him. Of all that he'd gone through in the last two weeks, what had it meant, what had it brought him? Grief and sorrow, certainly that. Hope and friendship, however, those mellow songs of all humanity. And his friendship with Ansley of Stirbane, the mystic, the Yellow Finch, was the zenith of humility for Zero.

Wearied by the wave of emotions, Zero drooped, wilted, and found the only thing he could do was fix Ansley's scarf knot. 'Why do you think we met?'

'It's fine, leave it,' Ansley spoke of the knot. He pushed Zero's hand away. They went through another examination of the other. Ansley's conclusions, Zero believed, had on their side intuition. Zero had nothing like that, and even hope began to dim.

Suddenly, Ansley lifted his hand, and a long yellow feather came up with it. He tucked it into the pocket of Zero's coat.

'Just as you said, priest,' Ansley turned away, the crunch of gravel deteriorating his voice, 'I needed you.'

Ansley didn't look back. It was bad luck.

-x-

Zero entered the house and shut the door behind him. The lantern returned to its place on the table. Odd, it was, to return to life after such a moment… He found his family. Mam fashioned a ball of yarn from a skein, and Nitten mended sheets. Uncle Pip was telling tales of bygone days, remembering his brother, their father. The only vacant chair had belong to him, the brother, the father, Joff Dertien, and Zero did not want to sit in it. But Mam patted its seat invitingly. Zero had no choice.

He sat and stared fixedly into the fire's stark red coals. Vier crawled over. His head rested on Zero's thigh, though he listened raptly to Uncle Pip, and laughed, and simpered; the calm after the storm. Zero was roused from a miasma of thought when Mam splayed her hand against his shoulder.

'Is he gone then?' she asked in a low hum.

Zero must've answered, though he recalled nothing of it. He was left with the impression that time, from that point, quickened its pace. And it sent him, without a stop, down an everlasting slope.

'Uncle?' He spoke up during a lull of conversation. Uncle was near to dozing.

'Yes?'

'Do you think…'

How to express it? But it was time, he knew it was time, to take up the mantle that had been given to him, somewhere in the last two weeks, between the plague and the mystic, between the snow and the heat; time to understand what he wanted, what he would do, and what he would fight against. He knew, already, what to fight for.

'Do you think this is the start of civil war?'

Uncle Pip's round eyes emoted a fragment of sadness. 'You know, Zero, my nephew, I think that is what it will be called—eventually, someday. A civil war.'

'You boys shouldn't talk so,' chided Mam. She glanced nervously at the two of them. Vier, thankfully, was sleeping, tucked into the hollow of Zero's feet. 'Talk of war! And the poor Queen lost in her grief… Shame on you.'

Uncle Pip wouldn't allow her to censor such a topic. 'But it's true, dearest Zasha, war is on its way. It will change the O.Z. forever. I can tell you now, that's exactly what it will do. And I can tell you now that I will always be a royalist.'

'So will I,' proclaimed Zero. 'The House of Gale will always have my support.'

'And what if,' said Nitten, not raising her head from her work, 'just what if—it's the House of Gale that's the enemy?'

But Zero would never have an answer to that question.


	8. Chapter 8

8.

'Oh. I think the story ends there.'

Out of the haze, the soot of dreams, the fog of heaviness, Zero returned to himself. He was not in the last place of his memory. The home he'd known in the south had vanished, and in its stead was an immense, cold room, bright with sunlight, crowded with the faces of strangers… Some strangers. He squinted one such face from distorted blears into sharp focus. He swallowed, a taste of blood, a scratchy throat. He remembered… The past was still the past. Seven annuals had come and gone, a blink of his eye, a momentary memory lapse. The heart sieved what grief it could, but some forms of love went on forever.

But hatred he could always remember.

'Azkadellia.'

The Viewer stepped from Zero. He leaned into the Sorceress and meekly supplied his opinion, should it be used at all.

'A fine specimen, my lady. Be mindful, however, of his strong will. But weakness of heart has softened him considerably. His love for the mystic has made him your enemy, yet he remains true to the House of Gale. He prays the gods bless you with redemption.'

Azkadellia was absolutely delighted. 'Redemption! A holy man! I couldn't have planned this if I'd tried! It's all so perfect! The nephew of the fabled and famous Captain Dertien! The hero of the Enscommon Siege! Won't he be delighted to know you've joined the ranks of the Longcoats at last? It was his idea we capture you at all. And you were in love with one of the mystics I personally tortured and killed! My,' she smiled and shook her head at the concept, 'this is just like one of those wonderful romances of legend I used to read as a girl.'

She returned to her confidential tone. 'Crutch, was he a priest? Oh, do tell me he was.'

'No, my lady,' Crutch stuttered nervously. 'Unfortunately, he never entered the priesthood. He joined the army the day he turned seventeen.'

'Just as he said he would!' She cackled a triumphant laugh. Her assistants, the entourage of her court, smiled and were pleased, merely at the show of her extreme bliss. 'A man of his word! So much honour!' For the fun of it, she held his chin so he might look into her eyes. 'So much petty, petty honour! Where did it get you? Strapped to a chair in the Dark Tower, and about to lose every ounce of independence you've cultivated for yourself, Zero Dertien. Such a pity, isn't it? Twenty-one annuals, all so wasted.' She patted his cheek and gave a sardonically remorseful sigh.

Zero let his jaw fall to his chest. He remembered being captured… He remembered coming to the Dark Tower, a building not yet complete, but the cells… The cells were complete. 'What do you want from me, Azkadellia? I have always been a loyalist. I fought with the army to defeat the rebels. I thought I was on your side.'

'Captain Dertien,' Azkadellia halted when her assistant cleared his throat, 'sorry, Captain Zero—I forget there's two of you—you should've listened to your sister.'

He stifled his thoughts, afraid she could read into him already. Maybe not yet, but soon… If Azkadellia laid a hand on Nitten…

She puckered her ruby mouth upward. 'Cute name, Nitten. Nittie, do you call her? You quaint southern folk with your quaint little names! Nitten is the eldest, then you and your ridiculously long first name, and then your darling little brother Vier. Oh, in case you forgot, _he's dead_.'

Then, losing her fairness of mind, Azkadellia loosened her rage against Zero. She slapped him heartily, right across the cheekbone, and catching a bit of lip. Huffing unalterable indignation, she put hands to her hips, glaring down at him.

'Sorry now that you didn't listen to Nitten? Because she was right. The House of Gale thanks you for your loyalty, Zero Dertien. And now I'm going to show you just how much your loyalty has meant to us. Crutch!'

'No,' Crutch whimpered, but he was dragged forward by Longcoats, 'no, I won't do it! I won't do it! He's a good man! He's too good, Azkadellia, Sorceress, powerful goddess!'

But the alchemist shocked him for this insubordination. Crutch screamed. Zero struggled against his pinions. Azkadellia glared knives his direction, then to Crutch.

'You told me he was a fine specimen. An excellent choice. Why the sudden change of heart, Crutch? Were you lying to me? Do you know what happens to Viewers who lie to me?'

'If you can break his will,' Crutch stammered, panting, confused, 'he'll be ever loyal, Sorceress. But if you break his will, that will be the end of him, the end of his mind. You'll have to cover up his thoughts so deeply that he won't… You won't be able to sustain it! He'll need to be constantly looked after. You never know when the moment might come when he remembers who he is—and how much he despises you.'

But she didn't listen. All she saw in it was the challenge. She set her hands against the arms of Zero's prison. He looked into her eyes, resigned to his fate, resigned to the hatred of his innermost self. She saw the swirls of his life, the coming and going of his emotions, the love, the desire, the loss—so much loss. His lips trembled though he did not cower.

'Did you really do it?'

She liked the sound of his voice. Tentative, slow—but oh that awful yokel accent would have to be wiped out of him. 'Do what, dearest?'

'Kill him… Kill Ansley of Stirbane?'

Azkadellia's crooked smile exemplified her crooked mind. She stabbed her fingernails into the flesh of his forearms. He withstood the pain, grimacing, tears surfacing, but he never cried out.

'With my own bare hands.'

He inhaled sharply. All the annuals of not knowing, wondering what had happened to him… Now he knew. But was he so sure? Azkadellia was a mistress of lies.

The sorceress stood back, and, continuing with her tender, insidious voice, replaced his doubt with confirmation.

'His soul tasted sweet with the love he had for you. Does it comfort you to know that? The two of you, such friends, such soul mates. He left behind a body, thin with the longing of you. Nothing but a body and a dozen yellow feathers.'

And now he was sure. The feathers… Of course there would be feathers. 'Yes,' he decided to say, even if they were his final words, 'it does comfort me to know that.'

Already fond of her new little toy, Azkadellia, behind Zero, combed down his messy hair, longing for the moment when she could tell him to cut it and he would do so without questioning her authority. His only want would be to obey her without a fractious thought. He'd walk across nails for her. He'd do anything for her.

'Oh, Zero,' she sighed contentedly, 'Zero, Zero… We're going to have such good times together, you'll see! You're just as cute as a little fluffy kitten!' She lassoed her arms around his neck and hugged him with a happy chuckle. 'You're going to be so much fun to break!'

'Sorceress, no, no, no…' Crutch continuously whimpered.

Azkadellia paid him no heed. 'Now, let's get you situated, shall we? Don't worry, it doesn't hurt—not very much, anyway. And when we're done, you can tell me all you know about this wonderful man your personal history mentioned just briefly.'

Zero pretended not to notice the Viewer's shiftiness, the readiness of the alchemists, or notice that these were the last moments he might ever be himself, that he might ever want to defeat Azkadellia.

'I must know absolutely everything about him you've ever heard. That's a good place to start. And your little friend Ansley, the only friend you've ever had in the whole wide world, Captain, seemed to know him personally. The rebel leader of the north. The literary figurehead. What was his name?' She feigned ignorance, then feigned remembrance. 'That's right—_Kiernan Cain_! I want him! His whole family! He's been a thorn in my side for the last five annuals! And that,' she stood close to him, her hands upon his head, 'that will be your first mission as a Longcoat. Find me Kiernan Cain.'

Kiernan Cain? What did he care for Kiernan Cain? The rebel leader was in hiding, had been for annuals… No one could find him. It would take a mystic, a friend, someone who could get close to him… Zero felt sleepy, the drowsiness no doubt emanating from some sort of spell. She was clever, resourceful, evil… And something else he sensed, an unrest, a disease. She was not herself…

Sleepy… Sleepy… Go to sleep, Zero. It won't hurt if you go to sleep… But if he closed his eyes, what would he find when he opened them, who would he find when he looked into the mirror tomorrow? He couldn't go to sleep…

He had to fight. One last fight. One last…

Azkadellia's breath snagged in her throat. She jumped back from Zero. Crutch scanned the vaulted room, searching for signs of the presence he had sensed. But he saw nothing.

'What is it?' Azkadellia demanded. 'Crutch! Tell me what it is!'

'I don't know…'

Perhaps the only thing that saved Crutch from death at that very moment was the astonishment of the sorceress. For she staggered to the wall, pinned herself there, and gulped hard. All the windows of the room rattled and flung themselves open. In came a rush of wind, howling and whispering. On the current rose a storm of feathers. Yellow and black and white, a soft, unending rain upon Zero.

Crutch swished through the feathers to look down upon the prisoner. 'He's protected.'

'By what? Magic?'

'Sorceress... At some point in time, you will have to learn that love is a very powerful thing.'

She was far too abhorred by this possibility to speak.

And, trying not to gloat, Crutch watched Azkadellia. He was awed to see fear in her eyes. 'It will take you a long while to bend him to your will, Sorceress. You may never have him completely. And he will take part in the rebels' stand against you. Let him go if you wish to continue with your rule.'

But she was stubborn. She would not give him up. She'd won him. He was hers. And how could she deny such a tempting challenge?

In one final rush of wind, the last of the feathers trailed in. The entire floor of the cavernous room was covered. A carpet that encircled Zero and, from him, wound out in a definite shape of black, white and yellow wings.

Zero opened his eyes.

The world had changed.

-x-

_End..._

-x-

Notes  
>Cardinal Days... Religious holidays<br>Q-plat... a quarter of a platinum  
>Seventh month... May<br>Gallenwood... shrub that grows near rivers, lakes and streams. Its leaves turn bright orange in autumn but do not fall until new growth in the spring. Twigs are burned during Cardintal (one of the Cardinal Days). When alight, the wood has a scent similar to musk and lily.  
>Diat... pronounced with a slight "J" sound at the front.<br>Thiatu... _thee_-AH-_too_


End file.
